GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke discusses the difficulty of using AI agents to automate legacy technical debt and mainframe code migration.
Prediction Held up
Dohmke: Copilot will resolve GitHub issues via draft PRs in 2025
“But we think, you know in 20, 25, we get into a place where you can assign a GitHub issue, a well-defined GitHub issue to a co-pilot and then it starts creating a draft pull request and it outlines the plan and then it works through its plan and you can, simil…”
Opinion
Dohmke: AI agents remain far from replacing median developers in systems thinking
“I think that's the part where we're far away from agents actually being good enough to take a very rough idea and break it down to small pieces without you as developer or as architect, or even when planning your travel, constantly getting questions back of wh…”
Opinion
Dohmke: Software teams will always require human review before production merges
“And while we don't believe that goes away from a pure security and trust perspective, you always want to have, you know, Another human in the loop before you merge code into production.”
Insight
Dohmke: Programming languages remain the essential deterministic layer below AI prompts
“We have the machine language layer, you know, which is Python or Ruby or Rust, right? Those are effectively abstractions of the chipset and the machine instruction set. And that's the last layer that's deterministic, right? Like programming language inherently…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Dohmke: AI will converge product management, design, and engineering roles
“I think tomorrow you're going to, as a designer, type effectively the same specification as a product manager and you have, you know, an AI to render the code for the wireframes and then apply, you know, grounding out of your design system to make it look like…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Dohmke: Developer tool differentiation will come from UX, not models
“And so I think the differentiation is going to come from both, you know, where the developer gets the most The best experience and doing that day to day, right? Like where can I, you know, start my morning, pick up, you know, something I want to work on, explo…”